Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2022 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

Worth Fighting For Since I was about eight or nine, I’ve been a huge fan of Muse. I’ve learned so much about animals, science, and the world around me from it. One of my earlier memories of reading Muse was when I was about 10. I read the issue on climate change (February 2017), and it both scared me and encouraged me to take action. That issue of Muse is one of the main reasons that I’ve gotten so involved in fighting climate change. I recently read a letter in the July/August 2021 issue of Muse which was written by Rachel and called “Climate Change for Muse Readers.” The writer of this letter made great points about how Muse is a magazine beloved by so many kids, all of whom…

IN ANCIENT JAPANESE TRADITION, A PERSON WHO FOLDS A THOUSAND PAPER CRANES WILL HAVE THEIR WISH MAGICALLY GRANTED. Today, engineers, designers, and scientists around the world are finding surprising new ways to use the paper-folding art of origami to make their real-world wishes come true. By adapting the same simple folds used in origami, engineers are finding exciting ways to build robots and satellites. Doctors are discovering novel ways to cure and treat disease. And architects are designing houses and buildings that will make our cities better places in which to live and work. Thanks to origami, great ideas aren't just on paper anymore. Here are four ways this grand story of scientific development is unfolding. SPACE TO GROW Transporting big things into space can be a massive challenge. The…

There are more than 5,000 species of songbirds. Neuroscientist Sarah Woolley can identify the nine species she studies just by listening to their song. Woolley examines the brains and behaviors of songbirds. Her lab at Columbia University in New York City investigates how songbirds learn to sing and use songs to communicate. Her research can help us understand how humans learn languages. Woolley discovered her love of songbirds in college, and she has studied their songs ever since. HOW DID YOU BECOME INTERESTED IN SONGBIRDS? I was an undergraduate student in college, and I was working in a lab that studied the development of motor behavior, or movements. I took a poster [a visual presentation researchers put together to summarize their work] to the Society for Neuroscience meeting, which had…

Lush rainforest meets the warm surf of the Pacific Ocean in the town of Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica. Scarlet macaws flash through the trees. An occasional howler monkey bellows from the canopy. A chorus of colorful birds sings night and day. It’s a tropical paradise. It’s also a great place to go to school...a rather unusual school. Here, the best students get to just hang around and sleep most of the day. Up in the treetops is a recent graduate. Her name is Hope. She’s a three-fingered sloth. In 2020, Hope was found orphaned and unable to survive on her own. Luckily, someone found her and brought her to The Sloth Institute (TSI), a non-profit organization/NGO dedicated to the rescue and release of sloths. Over the next year, Hope went…

COMPUTERS CAN ONLY FOLLOW THEIR PROGRAMMING. So, it may seem like they can’t treat people unfairly based on gender, race, age, disability, or other factors. Unfortunately, bias sneaks into technology all the time. How does it get there? And what can we do about it? Many artificial intelligence (AI) models use machine learning to drive cars, predict weather, translate languages, and more. During a training phase, developers show the model lots of data. The AI learns to recognize patterns in these data. Then the model can find the same patterns in brand new data. For example, a model might look at many examples of different people’s faces. Then it can learn to identify faces in photos or videos. But currently it can only learn to identify the types of faces…

SIGHTINGS Identified Flying Object Anew species of bat discovered in the southwestern United States is not much to look at—during the day, that is. It’s small and brown, and hard to tell apart from other desert-dwelling bats. That’s why scientists didn’t notice it until now. What makes the new bat remarkable is how it appears at night. The new species, named the bright-bellied bat, is the only mammal known to be bioluminescent. In other words, it gives off light. The light comes from glowing bacteria that live in a special pouch on the bat’s belly, where it has barely any fur. At night, the bacteria shine through the bat’s skin. Scientists think bats use this light to confuse their prey. Insects may even be attracted to the light. The new…

A collapsible umbrella looks downright simple next to one of Chuck Hoberman’s amazing unfolding toys. He’s an artist, engineer, and inventor who works in Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City. His most famous toy is the Hoberman Sphere—a ball of plastic struts and pivoting joints that wondrously unfurls to a latticework sphere many times its original size. Like a magician, Hoberman is fascinated by the notion of making something vanish, then suddenly reappear. He loves the idea of one shape smoothly transforming into another. He has a passion for designing things that not only look interesting but also act in a surprising way. Hoberman’s mother was a children’s book author and his father an architect. Perhaps not surprisingly, he enjoyed playing with building blocks, Lincoln Logs, and Erector sets when…

Imagine if one of these critters was your teacher. You’ve probably learned skills, like skating or cooking, from your friends or family. And it’s likely you learned to read and do math from your teachers at school. This ability to learn isn’t unique to you or other humans. Loads of critters—from minute flies to mighty elephants—acquire knowledge and skills over their lifetimes. But they usually learn on their own. They often don’t have teachers. Animal tutors are hard to spot. Yet biologists have found some distinguishing signs. An animal teacher repeats its actions in front of a pupil. Also, a tutor spends time and energy teaching without seeming to gain anything. And after a lesson, an animal student must show it has learned new stuff or become better at something…

In a forest clearing in Burgundy, France, the towers of an almost-built castle graze the sky. Birdsong accompanies the chopping of wood, chipping of stone, and clomping of horses. Women and men dressed like medieval craftspeople make the site thrum with activity, as they hammer anvils and wind ropes. Have you traveled back in time? Not exactly. The castle and its builders belong to the 21st century, even though the new buildings look like they’re 800 years old. There is a startling catch, though: The workers don't have any instructions for building a medieval castle. They're figuring out how to do this on their own. How could anyone construct something so grand with nobody to show them how? A Castle in the Air? In 1995, Michel Guyot, a businessman in…

A baby babbles from his snug resting place. The baby’s sounds include some adult sounds, only they’re not organized like an adult’s. As the baby gets older, his sounds get less random, and there’s a turning point at which his parents suddenly get what he’s saying. Does that sound familiar? This description is of a baby bird, a zebra finch. It highlights the similarities between how birds learn to sing and how humans learn to talk. In both birds and humans, newborns experiment with sounds in a seeming trial-and-error process of organizing them into something resembling their parents’ sounds. For both baby humans and hatchling birds, their babbling is also a form of gratifying play. Learning by Hearing Only birds and some mammals (humans and other primates, whales, seals, elephants,…

“Can we go already?” said Shania, sticking her head in the door. “You just got here,” said Priya without looking up. She was lying on the floor shoulder-deep under the couch in her lab. “Yes, and I’m hungry,” said Ziv, pushing into the room behind Shania. “What on earth are you doing down there?” “You’re always hungry,” said Benny, crowding in behind him. It was a large room, but between the furniture, the assorted equipment, and now the quartet of friends, things were getting a little cramped. “The restaurant can wait five minutes.” Priya gave the stick one more shove with the grabber tool she was holding and scrambled to her feet. “I’m just getting everything set up for my experiment. Want to see it run?” “Are those chocolate truffles?”…